I’ll Say It Again—Jesus Is Almighty God

Last week’s blog and podcast defending Jesus’ identity as almighty God generated a surprising number of defensive reactions. I know that Adventists are taught to understand that Jesus abandoned His “God-ness” when He became human, but I was startled at the heat behind the arguments that as a man on earth, Jesus was no longer God—or at least no longer in possession of God’s power and attributes.

I will share a couple of quotes (admittedly a bit confusing) which I copied from some Former Adventist groups on Facebook:

First quote

He certainly is [almighty God] but not while he was in the likeness of flesh. The reason is so that he could die in our place (Phil. 2:8-10): “And being found in appearance as a man, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to death—even death on a cross!”…

He had to be fully man to take our place. The works he did were the Holy Spirit working through Him. Philippians 2 tells us He gave up his right to be God, but he took it back again when he was resurrected. Jesus does say He is the son of God—that is, he came from the Father in heaven.

The problem with your belief is that Jesus died; can God die?

The answer is no.

The other verse [that tells us Jesus was not almighty God while on earth] is that Jesus was lower than the angels (Heb. 2:7, 9) which means He is a man like us. For a time God became a man and dwelt in human form, but in doing so he gave up his right to be God. That’s what the Scriptures say in Philippians 2:8-10.

He is God most definitely. In the Old Testament we see Jesus as almighty God, and in revelation when He returns He is almighty God, but for a season He became fully man just like us, yet in essence he was still God.

Second quote:

What Christ did was limit His omnipresence (His ability to be everywhere at once), in His “form” as God, yet He was still fully capable of being omnipresent, omnipotent, and omniscient. By taking on the form and appearance of man, He voluntarily limited Himself to a singular form, a single level of existence. Even angels live with a form allowing them to move between this fleshly realm and the spiritual realm. It was this limitation that Christ voluntarily took upon Himself that made Him lower than the Angels.

Adventist Physicalism Gets In the Way

I am the first to admit that the doctrine of kenosis, or Christ’s “emptying Himself” when He took the form of a servant (Phil. 2:7, 8) is something we cannot fully explain. After all, how does almighty God take on human flesh and incarnate deity into the body of a man? Scripture doesn’t explain this mystery, it merely states that it is so.

Nevertheless, God’s word gives us enough details so we can understand the facts: Jesus the man was, concurrently and without any break, God the Son. Right at this point of explanation, however, we have to accept what the Bible says about God’s essence in order not to gallop down a path of heresy. 

Unlike Adventism’s understanding of God (thanks to Ellen White’s testimonies), God does not have a body. Rather, Jesus Himself (the eternal God the Son who knew, inspired, and fulfilled Scripture) stated the essence of God:

But the hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth, for the Father is seeking such people to worship him. God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (Jn. 4:23–24).

This passage is remarkable for many reasons, but two that I find compelling are these: 

1. Jesus revealed the essence of God and of what it means to be made in His image, and 
2. this information (revealed to a Samaritan and a woman) provides the answer to the heretical doctrine that man is merely physical.

Jesus (who as God Himself, KNEW this fact) stated that God is spirit. In other words, God has no body, and God is not physical. God is spirit. 

Furthermore, Jesus stated that man has a spirit—not breath, not a mental attitude or sensitivity, but a literal, immaterial spirit which which to worship God who is spirit! Jesus makes a clear parallel statement: God is spirit, and true worshipers worship Him in spirit and truth. In other words, when we truly worship God, it is our immaterial spirits that honor Him. It is our spirits that know and worship the God who IS SPIRIT. 

We cannot read this statement of Jesus and argue that He was speaking metaphorically. We are made in His image by His having given us spirits—unlike the animals—and it is with our spirits that we know and worship God. We perceive His true nature and essence with our spirits which are in His image!

With this simple declaration uttered to an ostracized Samaritan woman, Jesus delivered the truth that exposes the Adventist belief that man is merely body-plus-breath. We definitely have bodies, but we have spirits. God has no body, but He is spirit. 

So, what does this understanding have to do with Jesus?

Kenosis—loss of essence or loss of position?

Because we with Adventist backgrounds automatically think of humans as being merely bodies that breathe, we have trouble understanding how Jesus could humble Himself and take the form of a servant without giving up His “God nature” for a time. 

If Jesus is “fully God”, we wonder, how can He be “fully man”? We were taught that He came with no advantage we don’t have. He came to overcome sin, to keep and vindicate the law, and to die for sin without cursing His slayers. We have a great deal of trouble not seeing Jesus as somehow having two physical identities: Man and Son of God.

Because Ellen White taught that Jesus gave up His attributes of omnipresence, omniscience, and omnipotence while in His body on earth, many of us understood Philippians 2:7, 8 to mean He gave up being God for a time. This understanding is nearly inescapable if one believes that man is merely a body plus breath and that God also somehow has a body. There is no sense of body and spirit existing together.

Here is what Philippians 2:5–8 says:

Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, by taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross (Philippians 2:5–8).

As Adventists we learned that Jesus “emptied himself” of deity (or its power) for a time. We learned He never used His godly powers for His own good, that He gave up His right to practice His omniscience, omnipotence, and omnipresence. Instead, we learned that Jesus performed His miracles as a man empowered by the Holy Spirit—just as we may expect to access God’s power as well.

In other words, we believed Jesus humbled Himself to become just a man as we are just humans. We learned that everything He did was an example to us to show us how we, too, could access the Holy Spirit to become fully obedient and empowered even for supernatural works.

In reality, this passage is saying nothing about Jesus emptying Himself of His nature as God; it is merely emphasizing that He gave up His glory and submitted to becoming human—without stopping being God. He “emptied himself” of His divine rights to glory and high position. Yet through all of this, He did not set aside His identity or His attributes as God.

Because Adventists have a worldview which denies literal “spirit”, it is hard enough for them to contemplate a person’s spirit being separate from one’s body. Given the additional complexity of the mysterious hypostatic union of God and man in the person of the Lord Jesus, Adventists with their physical view of reality have almost no framework for understanding that Jesus could empty Himself of His “rights” and “entitlement” as God the Son without ceasing to BE GOD in every detail. 

God is spirit, as Jesus Himself said, and His taking a physical body and a human spirit does not in any way require that His identity as God who is spirit be set aside. His human identity is now linked to His identity as God the Son, and emptying Himself does not require giving up any attribute of either identity. 

Jesus performed His miracles as God the Son; in fact, His miracles were fulfillments of the Old Testament Scriptures telling what the Messiah would do when He came. As God the Son (who is spirit) He did not cease to be omnipresent because His body was not part of His identity as God. God who is spirit is not limited by a human body.

We know this fact is true because other Scripture passages tell us that His deity was fully present in Jesus the man. Here are Colossians 1:16, 17 and Colossians 2:9:

For by him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or authorities—all things were created through him and for him. And he is before all things, and in him all things hold together (Col. 1:16–17).

For in him the whole fullness of deity dwells bodily (Col. 2:9).

We learn in these two verses that the FULLNESS of deity dwelt in Jesus bodily. In other words, every single attribute and the essence of God dwelt in the physical man Jesus. No shred of His nature or attributes was missing! 

Furthermore, we learn that Jesus has a specific role within the Trinity: He is the creator, and He is the sustainer of all creation. In fact, Colossians 1:17 makes this startling statement: “in him all things hold together”! 

Paul is declaring that the Lord Jesus is the Person who made and always sustains creation in Himself. Think about it: if all things hold together in Him, God the Son could not have ceased to exist nor otherwise gone “missing” during Jesus’ time on earth. No—creation has always been held together in Him.

Furthermore, since all the fulness of deity—all the essence of God the Son—dwelt in the physical Jesus, He continued to hold all creation together in Himself while He was in Mary’s womb and while He was in the tomb. His identity as God was not subject to His identity as man. The two exist together in Him. Spirit and body are not at odds. Jesus the man existed as a physical person with a human spirit, and God the Son existed in Him bodily. 

Jesus was not a mixture of man and God, nor was He predominantly man with God subdued to silence. He was fully functioning as a man, and He was fully functioning as God the Son. He just emptied Himself of His visible, rightful glory and position for the sake of living as a human and becoming our Sacrifice for sin.

Think of Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration. There His glory was visible to Peter, James, and John, but that glory was something He did not claim for Himself throughout most of His early life. Nevertheless, He did not give up His identity or existence as God.

Why the push back?

I have asked myself lately why so many former Adventists (not to mention Adventists) push back so strongly when confronted with the idea that Jesus is almighty God. Even when faced with the texts that clearly say that God was fully dwelling in the man Christ Jesus, the resistance is defensive and even angry. 

I don’t fully know the answer to this question, but I have some ideas based on my own former Adventist worldview. We were taught, based on Ellen White, that what Jesus was able to do, we can also do. As He overcame temptation and avoided sin, we can also. As He trounced the devil by quoting Scripture in the wilderness, we can also. As long as we learned our proof-texts, we would have any answer to silence the evil doubts that would assail our Adventist consciences. 

As Jesus prayed and relied on the Holy Spirit, so can we—and we will be able to keep the law with increasing perfection.

In fact, there’s a bit of over-identifying with the suffering Jesus that is part of thinking of Him as having no advantage over us. As long as we believed that He had laid aside His “God-ness”, we could imagine ourselves being like Him. After all, we were taught that we were to become more and more “like Jesus”—and this “becoming” was something we facilitated by self-denial and self-abasement and prayerful pleading. 

When we face the fact that Jesus was almighty God, not just before His incarnation but even from the moment of His conception as Mary’s Son, our familiar sense of Jesus being no different from us must go. Any idea that we are “little Jesuses” has to vanish. 

We are not asked to do what He did; we are asked to trust what He did! Yes, He became fully human in every way we are fully human—but He did not come dead in sin as we come into the world. He was conceived by the Holy Spirit and was spiritually alive without ever having to be born again.

Jesus was born a sinless, spiritually alive human baby, and He was concurrently the eternal, almighty God the Son cloaked in human flesh. We cannot make such claims for ourselves.

Jesus did not come to be our example of how to please God; He came to be our Substitute before God. He came to “become sin for us” so we might “become the righteousness of God in Him” (2 Cor. 5:21). 

Jesus went to the cross carrying our imputed sin, and He died as the fulfillment of the curse He Himself declared was the consequence of sin. He had to be fully human in order to pay for human sin. The law declared a death sentence for sinful humanity, and no other “specie” could fulfill that sentence. Only a human could fulfill the law’s decree that human sin required death. 

At the same time, only God could remove the curse of sin from humanity. Jesus’ death wasn’t just like the death of any one of us; He was God the Son, and His eternal omnipotence was required for the justification of all of us sinners who would believe in Him.

In other words, Jesus’ two natures were required for Him to be our sufficient sacrifice for sin: His humanity was necessary for Him to carry our human sin and to die a human death as a just payment for our transgression. His identity as God the Son was necessary in order for Him to be able to carry our collective sin and die a sufficient death for all who believe. His eternal omnipotence—His being God—is what made it possible for Him to be the Sacrifice for us all! 

Jesus is not my peer

I believe that those who push back against the biblical revelation that Jesus is almighty God in flesh don’t want to face that they are dependent on Jesus, not imitators of Him. To say that Jesus is almighty God means admitting that we are not His peers. 

Adventism taught us that during His years on earth, Jesus was just like us with no divine powers that we couldn’t access as well if we just prayed and trusted enough. 

Because Adventism taught that all humans are just bodies that breathe, we had no idea that we are all born spiritually dead and must be made spiritually alive through faith in Jesus. We had no framework for understanding that Jesus was born different from us: spiritually alive from the moment of His conception. 

This sinless Jesus emptied Himself of the glory and position that His identity guaranteed—and He lived among sinners to fulfill the law that doomed us to hell.

When we are confronted with Jesus’ true identity, we cannot stand shoulder-to-shoulder with him fighting Satan. No! When we see Him as He is, we are humbled in our shame.

Jesus singlehandedly defeated Satan at the cross, and when we know that He was always fully God in flesh, we have only one response: worship.

Jesus is not my buddy nor my fellow victim. He is my Lord, my Savior. When I see who He truly is, I can only bow before Him in repentance and gratitude. God the Son went to the cross in human flesh before breaking the power of death.

My Savior was never just a man emptied of divinity. Jesus has always been almighty God! †

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Colleen Tinker

Colleen Tinker, the editor of Proclamation! magazine, and her husband Richard left Adventism in 1998 with their two sons, Roy and Nathanael, who were in grades six and ten. They have co-led the Former Adventist Fellowship since 1999. Colleen, a graduate of Walla Walla University, is a former high school English teacher and also the former managing editor of Adventist Today magazine. Colleen became the stepmother of Roy and Nathanael in 1989, and in 2008 she adopted them. Romans 8:15-17 has assumed new depth and significance for her and Richard since she and her sons chose to claim each other legally and permanently. She and Richard share an office and a commitment to sharing the gospel of the true Jesus with all of those seeking a way out of the bondage of the false gospel of Adventism.

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